https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
Back to seriousness - the author claims there are limits to nuclear, wind, and solar, but does not state what those limits are. The limit on nuclear is not clear to me - France gets something like 75% of its energy from nuclear. It seems the main limit on nuclear has been public sentiment, which must be weighed with public sentiment on climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
https://www.ans.org/news/article-109/army-offroad-nuclear-tr...
Those are not good properties if you want to push technology forward quickly. The great thing about solar and wind is that we can iterate very quickly and catastrophic failure costs are nearly non-existent.
Nuclear still has great potential but the costs are just too high (and maybe they should be).
We should know without a doubt whether it is workable by 2050, perhaps before then.
I strongly recommend the book "The Future of Fusion Energy"[1] as a good summary of the current state of the field. It's written by two fusion researchers and is legit (I have a Master's in Physics myself and almost did a Plasma Physics PhD so I am somewhat familiar with the field).
The book isn't dry either, it's honestly one of the best books I've read in years.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Future-Fusion-Energy-Jason-Parisi/dp/...
If we believe the Titanic is sinking, why are we being picky about the lifeboat?
Anything beyond averting disaster is an over-optimization.
That's not quite correct. We do get 75% of our electricity from nuclear, but electricity is only ~25% of the energy consumed in France.
So in practice about 18% of our energy comes from nuclear, and way over 75% of it from fossil fuels.
But the will of the people and regulatory hurdles mean permitting and construction is slow and economics are not great. Also, there's probably a manufacturing capacity issue; if you wanted to get 100 new plants online in the next 5 years, and permitting and siting were a non-issue, getting the parts made would be.
Also you have a choice, build a nuke plant that will produce power for 50 years. Or buid a plant to produce solar panels for 50 years. That's an accounting problem that would be interesting to see the results of.
Essentially humans have access to the fluxes of solar, geothermal, and tidal energy, and the stores of fossil fuels, nuclear fission from naturally occurring uranium and plutonium, and potentially nuclear fission from hydrogen plus a few other essential light isotopes and/or elements.
All other energy sources are either carriers (as with hydrogen as a combustion fuel), or derivative. Notably hydroelectric, wind, biomass, and wave energy are all derivatives of solar flux. (Fossil fuels are derivatives of past solar flux.)
Solar is the most tractable large-scale power source. The raw rate of incidence is about 1 kW/m^2 at Earth's surface. This is reduced by a number of considerations, including land area, spacing factors, panel efficiencies, and losses through conversion (DC/AC), transmission, and storage. The net potential is perhaps 5% of the total incident quantity. And there's the small factor that all other life on Earth also competes for this resource.
Hydro is proven but largely exploited, and has environmental consequences now increasingly recognised and often untenable.
Total wind and wave power (the latter is effectively nil) are small fractions of total solar power. Wind power is attractive principally as in places where it HAPPENS to be prevalent, the capital costs are low relative to energy returned.
Geothermal, while independent of solar, is a small fraction of the latter, and is already largely utilised where available and practical, though there's significant undeveloped resource in Africa, and in the US in the Yellowstone Caldera, though official resource estimates exclude this due to its protected status as a National Park. (Pointed, the USGS utterly omits the Yellowstone Caldera in its geothermal resource survey of a decade or two back.) As baseload power, geothermal is attractive. Capital-intensive "enhanced" geothermal has proved disappointing to date (see Australia's Habanero project).
Tidal energy is worth mentioning only because it's independent of the usual solar/nuclear axis: tidal energy actually represents a tap on gravitational potential of the Earth-Moon-Sun system. It's slightly more viable than wave energy, but save for a few very limited local applications, not practicable. Tapping the entire tidal potential of, say, the San Francisco Bay would not even power the city of San Francisco at current electric utilisation, let alone full energy demands, or of the greater Bay Area. And this would require entirely damming the Bay.
Nuclear fission suffers from a fuel shortage problem: known nuclear reserves would power present human energy needs for about 15 years, total. At present rates of utilisation, that lifetime is extended, but still comes in at under a century. There's the standard bickering about definitions of reserves, and talk of seawater extraction (of uranium, other fuels not being salt-water soluable), breeding (of plutonium), or use of thorium, under either existing or novel reactor designs. All three options have significant limitations, though some may be technologically feasible. The resulting energy system and economy would be fragile and risk-prone.
Fusion is as it's always been, the power source of the future. And always will be, as the punch line goes.
That's the lineup. Murphy has a good overview of numbers. Vaclav Smil in numerous of his books (Energy and Civilization and Energy in World History, an earlier edition of the same book, though with somewhat different organisation, as well as others) takes a deeper dive into many of these issues.
Mind that solving the energy problem is only one of numerous stumbling blocks between now an a long-term viable technological human civilisation. Numerous others exist, and the fundamental fact remains that economic growth (and its concommittant and requisite resource and energy growth) simply cannot continue indefinitely.
Economic growth occurs in any situation where you increase productivity. But this means you can increase productivity in anyway, including by efficiency improvements.
Economic growth can't be sustained at the same rate it has been, but it can be sustained because while 100% efficiency is an asymptote it is approachable.
~30 terawatts, about double the electrical consumption of the whole planet, is effectively nil?
" [tidal is] slightly more viable than wave energy"
Why do you say this?
My biggest takeaway from his book is that transitioning a society to affluence requires, at minimum, 22.6 megawatt hours of energy per capita per year. High energy societies like the United States use far more. To de-carbonize, we have to plan new energy sources that provide at least this much energy for every person on the planet. Otherwise, people will understandably turn to carbon-based energy sources to meet their energy needs.
Producing this much energy from renewables is possible, but it is hard! Fossil fuels provide an exceptionally compact (in terms of land area) and effective energy source.
[edited to correct typo in the energy figure, what I originally wrote as 2.6 mw/h is 22.6 mw/h]
While the US hasn’t managed the political will for significant climate reform, we are far from the majority of the world, and even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation, it’s unlikely that this would be enough to avert climate change. The developing world wants modern life, and if they have to burn fossil fuels to catch up, they will.
There are really only a few situations that lead to radical global change:
1. Severe crisis, such as a nation-ending war.
2. Extraordinary visionary leadership in the right place at the right time... which often leads to serious crises such as nation-ending wars.
Otherwise, progress comes from the chaotic, messy evolution of humanity. Perhaps we will innovate our way out of climate disaster, perhaps the ecology will gradually change and we’ll be forced to adapt, or (my guess) perhaps some of both. The good news is we actually have a lot of the technology we need, and more is being developed all the time. I for one am optimistic that between innovation and adaptation the future will continue to be bright.
It's actually quite likely that it would go a long way towards averting climate change. Sure, the US contributes only about 6 GT of greenhouse gases of the 50 GT emitted by the whole world annually, so it first seems that zeroing out this would still result in 44 GT worth of emissions left.
But going from 6 GT to zero cannot be done without huge innovation. Technological innovation, innovation in policy, oversight, enforcement. These pieces of innovation can (and will) be shared with the rest of the world. When the price of solar panels went down, it went down globally. If the US Navy implements a way to scrub CO2 out of seawater and make fuel out of it [1], others can use the method too. Even if the US won't share the technology outright, just knowing it can be done will let others know the idea is worth investing in.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200715123120.h...
The hard part is that the structure of our governance is such that extractive industries wield way more power than they would in other environments.
The downsides are secondary environmental effects (e.g. ocean acidification), the hesitancy of a single country to make a climate altering decision for the rest of the world, and the general bad optics of sweeping the problem under the rug for future generations. All that being said, up until now the tangible costs of climate have so far been relatively mild. If nothing big enough gets done on the carbon side, which seems increasingly likely, then warming will reach the point where it starts imposing major economic and humanitarian costs.
At that point, it's nigh inevitable that at least one major power will bite the bullet and start pumping the stratosphere full of sulfur dioxide.
And I’m not anti science. I’m a former scientist and almost all my experiments usually ended with me realizing I don’t know what I thought I knew, especially when I took something from a simple system I understood and added it to a complex system (the earth in this scenario).
People thought that obviously, all countries would see the common interest in protecting Earth's climate. There was ONE major rogue nation in this big plan: USA. G.W Bush was the one who presented climate change denial as a respectable policy. I am not sure people measure the impact of this position.
Most other advanced countries cut down their emissions, much more than the US did (no, it is not a matter of density, distance between cities or so on: even if you remove all emissions due to vehicles, USA is still way above EU).
> The developing world wants modern life, and if they have to burn fossil fuels to catch up, they will.
China will peak at a much lower level of CO2/capita than the US currently has. Given the current trajectory, it is quite possible that China will never in its history emit more CO2/capita than the US.
> Extraordinary visionary leadership in the right place at the right time
Give me a break. Listening to the consensus of experts, both international and domestic experts, on issues that threaten the whole ecosystem, is not "visionary leadership". It is called "not electing a cartoon villain in office".
> even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation
You would also need to nuke Bhutan and Suriname, two carbon-negative countries.
Try buying petroleum from OPEC in anything but USD: https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/data_graphs/40.htm
Corollary: http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/meast/10/30/iraq.un.euro.reut/
Only in the US is there a political debate about climate change denialism. Thanks to you it is coming to other countries, but before GWB it was a fringe position everywhere.
For a timeline of awareness of the problem we can go back over 200 years for early insights:
1800-1870: Level of carbon dioxide gas (CO₂) in the atmosphere, as later measured in ancient ice, is about 290 ppm (parts per million).
Mean global temperature (1850-1870) is about 13.6°C.
First Industrial Revolution. Coal, railroads, and land clearing speed up greenhouse gas emission, while better agriculture and sanitation speed up population growth.
1824: Fourier calculates that the Earth would be far colder if it lacked an atmosphere.
1859: Tyndall discovers that some gases block infrared radiation. He suggests that changes in the concentration of the gases could bring climate change.
1896: Arrhenius publishes first calculation of global warming from human emissions of CO₂.
1897: Chamberlin produces a model for global carbon exchange including feedbacks.
1870-1910: Second Industrial Revolution. Fertilizers and other chemicals, electricity, and public health further accelerate growth.
1914-1918: World War I; governments learn to mobilize and control industrial societies.
1920-1925: Opening of Texas and Persian Gulf oil fields inaugurates era of cheap energy.
1930s Global warming trend since late 19th century reported.
Milankovitch proposes orbital changes as the cause of ice ages.
1938: Callendar argues that CO₂ greenhouse global warming is underway, reviving interest in the question.
1939-1945: World War II. Military grand strategy is largely driven by a struggle to control oil fields.
1945: US Office of Naval Research begins generous funding of many fields of science, some of which happen to be useful for understanding climate change.
1956: Ewing and Donn offer a feedback model for quick ice age onset.
Phillips produces a somewhat realistic computer model of the global atmosphere.
Plass calculates that adding CO₂ to the atmosphere will have a significant effect on the radiation balance.
1957: Launch of Soviet Sputnik satellite. Cold War concerns support 1957-58 International Geophysical Year, bringing new funding and coordination to climate studies.
Revelle finds that CO₂ produced by humans will not be readily absorbed by the oceans.
1958: Telescope studies show a greenhouse effect raises temperature of the atmosphere of Venus far above the boiling point of water.
1960: Mitchell reports downturn of global temperatures since the early 1940s.
Keeling accurately measures CO₂ in the Earth's atmosphere and detects an annual rise.
1962: Cuban Missile Crisis, peak of the Cold War.
1963: Calculations suggest that feedback with water vapor could make the climate acutely sensitive to changes in CO₂ level.
1965: Boulder, Colo. meeting on causes of climate change: Lorenz and others point out the chaotic nature of climate system and the possibility of sudden shifts.
1966: Emiliani's analysis of deep-sea cores and Broecker's analysis of ancient corals show that the timing of ice ages was set by small orbital shifts, suggesting that the climate system is sensitive to small changes.
1967: International Global Atmospheric Research Program established, mainly to gather data for better short-range weather prediction, but including climate.
Manabe and Wetherald make a convincing calculation that doubling CO₂ would raise world temperatures a couple of degrees.
1968: Studies suggest a possibility of collapse of Antarctic ice sheets, which would raise sea levels catastrophically.
1969: Astronauts walk on the Moon, and people perceive the Earth as a fragile whole.
Budyko and Sellers present models of catastrophic ice-albedo feedbacks.
Nimbus III satellite begins to provide comprehensive global atmospheric temperature measurements.
1970: First Earth Day. Environmental movement attains strong influence, spreads concern about global degradation.
Creation of US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the world's leading funder of climate research.
Aerosols from human activity are shown to be increasing swiftly. Bryson claims they counteract global warming and may bring serious cooling.
1971: SMIC conference of leading scientists reports a danger of rapid and serious global change caused by humans, calls for an organized research effort.
Mariner 9 spacecraft finds a great dust storm warming the atmosphere of Mars, plus indications of a radically different climate in the past.
1972: Ice cores and other evidence show big climate shifts in the past between relatively stable modes in the space of a thousand years or so, especially around 11,000 years ago.
Droughts in Africa, Ukraine, India cause world food crisis, spreading fears about climate change.
1973: Oil embargo and price rise bring first "energy crisis".
1974: Serious droughts since 1972 increase concern about climate, with cooling from aerosols suspected to be as likely as warming; scientists are doubtful as journalists talk of a new ice age.
1975: Warnings about environmental effects of airplanes leads to investigations of trace gases in the stratosphere and discovery of danger to ozone layer.
Manabe and collaborators produce complex but plausible computer models which show a temperature rise of several degrees for doubled CO₂.
1976: Studies show that CFCs (1975) and also methane and ozone (1976) can make a serious contribution to the greenhouse effect.
Deep-sea cores show a dominating influence from 100,000-year Milankovitch orbital changes, emphasizing the role of feedbacks.
Deforestation and other ecosystem changes are recognized as major factors in the future of the climate.
Eddy shows that there were prolonged periods without sunspots in past centuries, corresponding to cold periods .
1977: Scientific opinion tends to converge on global warming, not cooling, as the chief climate risk in next century.
1978: Attempts to coordinate climate research in US end with an inadequate National Climate Program Act, accompanied by rapid but temporary growth in funding.
1979: Second oil "energy crisis." Strengthened environmental movement encourages renewable energy sources, inhibits nuclear energy growth.
US National Academy of Sciences report finds it highly credible that doubling CO₂ will bring 1.5-4.5°C global warming.
World Climate Research Programme launched to coordinate international research.
1981: Election of Reagan brings backlash against environmental movement to power. Political conservatism is linked to skepticism about global warming.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2014/11/30/why-...
It feels like this slow train wreck will have to get worse before we do enough, giving us more time to advance technology.
The United States is no longer the biggest emitter. Now we need more global coordination.
Of course, the sooner we started addressing the problem, the longer we could have delayed the problem.
Fusion by 2050?
1. Trillion-dollar fortunes are built on pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. We, as humans have committed genocide against entire cultures over less money.
2. The wealth of industrialized societies is not built on money, or labour. It is built on energy. All of their wealth is derived from energy. Fossil fuels are an incredible source of energy. Cost-effective competitors to them had limited potential to replace them, for a large number of technical and political reasons.
In the 60s France started switching to nuclear power because it worried about the depletion of oil wells in the areas it controlled. It is wrong to say nuclear power can't power more than 10% of a country.
Thing is that since the time of Jevons, the only energy sources added to our knowledge are nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and the rather improbable prospect of antiatter annihilation (an energy carrier rather than energy source).
Solar PV has emerged as an energy conversion technology, first discovered as the photoelectric effect in the late 19th century and scientific theory identified by Einstein.
We've seen considerable technical improvements to technologies known since the 1950s, but also clear limitations (fission and fusion most especially, but also maximal efficiencies of PV and battery storage). Efficiencies have improved, toward the bound of theoretical limits, and costs fallen.
But we're still largely living in the world of 1857 in terms of the options available to us.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Jevons: https://archive.org/details/TheCoalQuestion
2. Referenced by Jevons. Available at https://archive.org/details/naturalhistorym00millgoog
There's no economic forcing function either since coal and gas remain on average the cheapest and easiest to deploy and manage sources of energy, and that won't change unless there's enough investment in alternatives to get them over the mass adoption hump.
The worst fears about fossil fuel depletion have so far not manifested, which might be a bad thing long term. We may have enough fossil carbon to cause truly catastrophic climate change if we actually burn a significant fraction of it.
I wonder though if the economic structural problem isn't even harder to solve. The entire financial system relies on eternal growth. Number must always go up or everything breaks.
Even if we put an end to most fears about supply side limits to growth by cracking fusion or developing super cheap utility scale batteries, there would still be demand side limits to growth from things like stabilizing populations and diminishing marginal utility of wealth. Mere stability without significant growth would bring about the collapse of the financial system and the economy as we know it, and probably quite a lot of political turmoil since we don't have a really great replacement sitting in the wings.
(No, planetary migration won't keep GDP growth going any time soon. Humans could settle on the Moon or Mars but they're too far away to contribute much to our Earthly GDP. They'd be mostly isolated economies of their own.)
I don't really agree with your take on things but this one stuck out to me as particularly wrong. If there were suddenly another population of humans on another planet, there would, at a minimum, be a regular flow of digital goods, as well as physical shipments, largely one way earth -> mars.
I will say I disagree about fossil fuel being cheapest though. The data show we’re at the inflection point now such that new renewables are cheaper even than natural gas and coal. That is very likely to get even cheaper.
I think the real exciting and interesting challenge is how to adopt society to energy that is incredibly cheap and abundant BUT not necessarily stable. Batteries are the most obvious and likely best solution, but are there other adaptations that we could make?
Consider, for example, and two-priority grid: your house could have one circuit that it “interruptible” and may cut off during severe shortages, while a second circuit is uninterruptible and powers things like your heating in the winter. This is just an idea off the top of my head, but there are many many other things that we could potentially do to adapt.
China is often mentioned as adding new coal power plants, but even there coal fell from 80% of electricity generation in 2010 to 57.7% in 2019.
Natural gas on the other hand has become more popular, but it also produces significantly less CO2 per kWh.
Every utopian dream contains a totalitarian nightmare in it, unfettered capitalism is no exception. The truth is that different problems require different solutions, markets are good for some things but not others.
In the United States public planning is typically limited to figuring out how to prop up the private financial system for one more quarter. In the U.S. most money is created through real estate mortgages. Although people like to talk about gold, crypto, consumers, producers, and government spending the mainstream financial system in charge of allocating the resources is really a mortgage based system.
Suppose someone has an estate with buildings and structures with replacement cost of $200,000. A broker says the estate has a comparable sales price of $600,000. In a loose money system we just trust the banks and brokers to do all of the planning, publicly guarantee mortgages at the reported $600,000, and have federal reserve buy assets to prop up prices at whatever number private finance has fixed upon.
In a slightly tighter system, we might cap real estate loan guarantees at 200% of replacement cost of non-land fixed capital. So if property has buildings and fixtures worth $200,000 public loan guarantees max out at $400,000 even if broker says property is worth $600,000. In order to write up price to $600,000 the owner would need to install $100,000 more in fixed capital, the effect of which is to redirect a larger share of the money created through mortgages to other sectors of economy.
How to use this to promote green energy investment?
Suppose instead of a replacement cost cap of 200% there was a replacement cost cap of 150% for normal capital and 250% for green capital. Then in order to take out a property loan for $600,000 the owner would have to install at least $400,000 of normal capital (structures, fixtures, equipment) or at least $240,000 of green capital (solar panels, wind turbines, lifted mass storage systems), regardless of how high the land values in the location had been written up.
In our current system the incentive of brokers is really just to write up asset prices as high as possible until the financial system collapses in order to generate some nice asset gains during credit bubbles. We can take advantage of this greed and use it to promote green energy investment by tightening up rules for lending against speculative land values using fixed capital replacement cost caps, which are slightly looser for fixed capital which is green.
> Agriculture may have set us humans on an unsustainable path, but fossil fuels broadened that path to a superhighway.
We need to put the "agriculture was our biggest mistake" trope to bed. Sustainability is an illusion. Nothing is sustainable in the cosmos, it just looks that way when you constrict the time horizon enough. Pre-agriculture, Homo Sapiens were on the constant brink of extinction, just like every other animal. The earth provides no safe comfort to any being. (The fact that we've created a society which provides for me to type this screed without glancing over my shoulder once is a miracle.)
Humans are unique, and agriculture was a monumental step in our epic journey. Without agriculture, the dunes of Mars would crumble in darkness and countless stars would radiate for no conscious creature to marvel at and wonder.
Fossil fuels were a tremendous gift: cheap energy. Without it, who knows how far behind our society would be? We almost certainly wouldn't yet have commercial air travel, 4+ billion people globally connected on the internet, or mRNA vaccines.
Yes, no gift comes for free. But let's not treat this like some deal with the devil. It is up to us to manage the costs (and they are real!) We don't master plan this stuff, but I'll bet on humans to figure it out every time.
So, is it any surprise that someone that calls agriculture "the biggest planning failure in human history" would have this conclusion?
> Without planning, this is what will most likely happen: we’ll fail to produce enough renewable energy to power society at the level at which we want it to operate. So, we’ll continue to get most of our energy from fossil fuels—until we can’t, due to depletion. Then, as the economy crashes and the planet heats, the full impacts of our planning failure will finally hit home.
If you're going to be a doomsaying pessimist (which, mind you, every era of history has had in droves), at least put some effort into it.
I think he was clearly too pessimistic about the potential of nuclear.
> Today, the US gets about 8 percent of its total energy from nuclear power...
Note this is of all energy including the gas in your car. Obviously we are reliant on electrification if our transport system to tackle that, which doesn’t seem considered here. Possibly he didn’t foresee the potential to electrify transport hence the pessimism. No one is expecting solar, wind, or nuclear powered cars. They’re expecting solar, wind, and nuclear powered electricity grid charging batteries in cars, third rails, and overhead catenary.
Nuclear is ~20% of all electricity output on that grid today in the USA. And in France it’s ~70%.
It’s clear it can go to much higher.
The world is (one hopes) just beginning to emerge from a global disaster of a known variety, for which there has been longstanding scientific and technical understanding, as well as existing paybooks for dealing with the situation. Response by the most capable and technologically-advanced countries has often been abysmal.
The coming global energy transition is going to be orders of magnitude more complex and fraught than the COVID-19 pandemic has been. And this is uncharted territory, with no tested playbook (the IPCC guidelines and publications are at least a playbook), and ongoing dissent within and among countries as to measures to be taken and how costs are to be allocated.
William Ophuls studied this question beginning in the late 1960s. His PhD dissertation in political science at Yale was published as Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity[1] in 1977 (it's been revised since), and the question has been Ophuls's life work.[2]
In particular, Ophuls's assessment of the global situation in the 1970s, the likely developments in ensuing decades, which 44 years on we can compare against history, and likely sticking points yet to come, stand out. Ophuls is a realist, but an optimist (perhaps somewhat less of the latter with time). He does see a path out. But it hasn't been the path chosen over the past five decades.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Ophuls: https://archive.org/details/ecologypolitics00ophu
2. Bibliography: https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=au%3Ao...
But do I feel like a hero for all the fuel I saved, the carbon I didn't emit, the road space I freed up? Do I feel like I made a difference? No, all I did was make it easier for others to do those things, and boy did they ever continue doing them, in increasing numbers, the entire time. Even my so-called people, transportation reform "activists," bend over backward not to "shame" each other for buying cars, and buying cars to replace the cars they bought before. So I feel more like a sucker than a hero when I consider all that. In the end it has to be about just getting outside and enjoying the fresh air.
I imagine global warming will present many such problems with solutions that will have no impact on global warming itself.
Unbridled optimists sell woo.
